Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Shape of Water
2017 · Guillermo del Toro · The Shape of Water on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count how rarely red appears, and who is wearing it. (light)
Laustsen soaks walls, uniforms and water in teal and green until the color stops describing objects. Red is rationed: Elisa's shoes, a slice of pie. Each appearance lands like a spoken line.
Payoff: Color does the talking for a woman who cannot talk, which is what melodrama has always used it for. In the reading: affective color. The green is what the reading calls affective color: a color that soaks up the whole scene's feeling instead of describing things in it.
Watch the camera drift sideways and crane gently in dry rooms. (camera)
Del Toro and Laustsen photograph corridors, apartments and the lab with the same slow floating movement they use for water. Rain streaks windows; glass doubles faces. The air seems to have weight.
Payoff: The whole city feels submerged before anyone gets in a tank, so the creature's element is already everywhere. In the reading: reume (liquid perception-image). This is the reading's reume: perception that flows rather than aims, belonging to no one in particular.
Watch Sally Hawkins's face in the seconds before she signs anything. (performance)
Hawkins builds Elisa from small accumulating movements, not held expressions. Pressure gathers in the eyes and mouth and hands until it has to go somewhere. She is hungry, not patient.
Payoff: With no dialogue, the face becomes the place the film stores everything the character wants. In the reading: icon of power (potisign). The reading calls this the potisign: a face where feeling builds toward a threshold instead of simply expressing one mood.
Track the morning routine: timer, bath, boiled eggs, bus. (structure)
Wolinsky sets the sequence as patterned montage early, then repeats it with changes. The order shifts, a step drops, a new gesture appears once the creature is in her life.
Payoff: You measure how far Elisa has traveled by what her body does each morning, not by anyone telling you.
Listen for dripping, sloshing, machine hum and the cinema below. (sound)
Because Elisa never speaks, del Toro fills the track with water, records, radio and Desplat's waltzing accordion score. The creature answers in clicks and trills. Silence gets a lot of room.
Payoff: A vocabulary of sounds and signs replaces dialogue, and you learn to read it as fluently as speech.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: A woman who cannot speak is given color, water, camera drift and a score to say everything for her.